All Stuffed Up

Another day at home with a cold, another craft project started and completed! This project took probably an hour, I wasn't actually timing it though. I used a storebought pattern and the bear turned out much larger than I was expecting so I think for future bears I will take the pattern to a copy machine and shrink it down to a smaller scale!

I have a friend who makes bears like this for a charity called Operation Teddy Care. They give the bears to counselors, medical professionals, military personnel, etc. who then give the bears to kids who are impacted by abuse, neglect, illness, conflict, war, and so forth. I think this is a wonderful outlet for crafting energies so in the hopes that I might someday be proficient (and proliferent) enough to contribute to this cause, I decided to try making a bear. I've made wearable things, pillows, quilts, and bags before but never stuffed animals, so this was quite a fun opportunity to sew together a three-dimensional cuddle friend.

As a bonus I was able to use up most of this blue fabric I had leftover from a nursing cover I made for a friend a couple of years ago. Now I will need to make more stuffed animals and use up more fabric!

I also took the opportunity to snap a couple of new shots of my "Midnight Fantasy" quilt which is currently adorning a twin bed in our guest room. This is the first quilt I ever made, which I completed back in 2007. It is actually sized for a queen bed, but on a twin it drapes over the sides to cover the mattress nicely, which is a good thing because we don't have sheets on this bed yet!

On a /roll

Decorating the first group of pillowboxes was so much fun last night that I continued the project today and tried some different colors and styles. Mother's Day is coming up (my mom loves purple!) as well as several birthdays in our family. If I don't plan a gift ahead of time, there's always the last-minute gift card and if I already have these little boxes decorated, they would be a great way to quickly wrap up a gift card (with room to spare for a handful of candy!).

Playing with Colors

I painted a couple smaller 8x10 pictures to try out some different techniques and ideas. The smaller canvases are inexpensive and great for a beginner like myself. I could even paint over them and reuse the canvas later.

This [Card Box] takes the cake!

This weekend I finished another one of my wedding craft projects. I made a box for cards that looks like a wedding cake!

Materials:
1 set of 3 hat boxes
1 roll of 1.5" blue organza ribbon
1 roll of 1" blue satin ribbon
2 feet of wired blue ribbon (optional)
1 tube of ivory acryllic paint

Tools:
- hot glue gun
- Craft knife
- Scissors
- Sponge paint brush

Basically I got three round nesting hat boxes from Michael's, cut holes in the tops of the bottom two boxes and a slot in the top box, painted them with acryllic paint, hot glued them together, then added decorative ribbon using double-stick tape. It was a fun, fast, and easy project.


3/24/09 Post-Wedding Update - The wedding cake-shaped card box served as functional decor at the gift table in the foyer as guest entered the church for our wedding. We received a lot of cards!


Picture by Siang of Lightphoria - www.lightphoria.com

A [Quilt] of Epic Proportions

I just finished my first quilt! I admit this undertaking was greater than I first expected, but in the process I learned many new sewing tricks. I learned to sew long strips before cutting them into squares. I learned to chain squares together to keep them in order and to save time while sewing. I also learned that it is quite difficult to sew buttons in the middle of a queen-sized blanket.

I call this my "Midnight Fantasy" quilt. This theme inspired my color choices as well as the patterns themselves. If I didn't think it could be a part of a story like A Midsummer Night's Dream or Lord of the Rings then I wasn't going to use it.